Lost: A Perfect Illustrator for Chapter 8’s Content
Our promt from this week asks of us the following:
In Lost, the organization is new and results from some pretty unexpected circumstances. The characters do not have the luxury of choice either in their position on the island or of their “coworkers”. How do the characters in lost organize their work? What conflicts must they resolve, and how do they do it? What happens when they fail? The circumstances here are pretty intense, and some discussion of how they compare to the situations the Mann Gulch firefighters face would be interesting as well. Do they operate more like teams or networks?
In the first two episodes of Lost, organization is a little informal and spontaneous. The survivors haven’t yet been stranded for more than two days, so the real tests for survival haven’t yet arrived. They are still eating food from the airplane’s trolly, they aren’t yet feeling the desperate effects of dehydration or sun exposure, and they haven’t begun to fully understand the difficulties the island’s wildlife will pose. All of this being said, some parallels can be drawn between the actions taken by the characters in the pilot episodes and the book’s chapter on teams and networks.
As a quick note, this wiki page has images of all characters and their names. A warning — it does contain some end-of-season spoilers in the form of character mortality outcomes.
There are several instances of blatant team organization in Lost’s pilot episodes.
One example is the team formed when Sayid asks those around him to help him remove the dead from the aircraft wreckage. While it lacks some of the five aspects of a team as laid out in the book (p. INSERT), it does have obvious roles, consensus management, and cultural diversity. Everyone has the same basic role — remove the deceased in a respectful manner — and everyone agrees this is the group’s goal. The members are of various cultures, and while this seems to cause a little friction in other instances, all tensions are laid aside to achieve the goal at hand. It is a work team in that the group is responsible for all aspects of the task — the removal of the bodies, their placement in a quiet place, and assumedly their treatment as it becomes more obvious that rescue is not coming.
Another example of a team is the three-man team made when Jack asks Hurley to escort a very pregnant Claire away from the wreckage fairly immediately following his regainment of consciousness. There are roles here, and a clear consensus of directive as well as a definite hierarchy — Jack will tell Hurley what to do, and he should then do it alongside Claire. This is something between a project team and a work team. It’s a project team since there are many other efforts underway, headed often by Jack, to remove people from harm’s way. It’s a work team in that it has a start goal and an end goal, and between Jack, Hurley, and Claire, the situation is unique, and the goal needs to be accomplished by the group. Between the two, I feel it is more of a small project group.
An interaction that is something like a network occurs when Jack stumbles upon Boone improperly administering CPR to Rose. Here, communication is a chain-like structure between Boone and Jack. Jack gives Boone information (his CPR technique is ineffective), Boone passes information back (he thinks the technique is fine and suggests a tracheostomy), Jack gives him information and a directive (go find a pen), and Boone passes back his understanding. He later returns, having completed his fruitless task. There is a consensus of goal here, but there is no conflict mediation or consensus on the steps needed to achieve an end (to save Rose’s life). It is not a team — it is a chain-like network.
Another instance of a chain-like network occurs between Jack and Hurley when Hurley is asked to find any medication containing antibiotics. There isn’t much consensus of a goal here — Jack is passing on information in the form of a directive, and Hurley achieves it, searching bags and returning to the surgeon with his findings. There isn’t time for mediation or consensus, and there certainly isn’t time to establish roles outside “Jack knows what he is doing with this, do what he says”. It is an example of a network.
Finally, there are the three major or obvious examples of networking and teamwork: the endeavor to find the cockpit by Jack, Kate, and Charlie; the expedition to find satelite signal for the plane’s repeater undertaken by a good chunk of the survivors; and the overall network formed when each person met another survivor in the hours following their crash.
The cockpit adventure undertaken by Kate, Jack, and Charlie is a good example of a hybrid networked-team. Kate and Jack spontaneously decided to hunt down the cockpit after Kate’s recollection of the crash’s physics, and Charlie, being nearby and otherwise-motivated to find th cockpit, offers to come. The team forms from networked communication. The team is then a work team — one which needs to achieve some goal alone and in its entirety, employing various roles and consensus along the way. At one point, a conflict is encountered — Charlie disappears, and Kate is skeptical as to his reasonings. But it is resolved by the sheer necessity to survive.
The expedition to climb cliff faces to reach higher ground is undertaken by such characters as Sayid, Shannon, Sawyer, Kate, and Jack. This is a good example of two teams coming together. Sawyer with Hurley worked to fix the retrieved repeater. Once fixed, the larger group came to a goal consensus and began to climb. Along the way, there were many conflicts. Sawyer’s general dislike of Sayid flared up on several occasions, stifled by the rest of the focused group, being not in a mind to tolerate racial tensions when dealing with survival. Another conflict arose between Shannon and her brother as she first offered to go with the group and then when her French experience was needed to translate the repeating message picked up by the repeater. Here, both conflicts were resolved when Shannon’s actions became paramount to the group understanding the nature of the island. This is an example of several project teams coming together in a work team — a fairly common endeavor in the comparably placid world of corporate functionality.
And finally, there is the baseline network formed as each character interacts with another. They all recognize the need to know one another and mark them as fellow survivors. This network will be used and reinforced as the group continues to face challenges. It will allow for survivors to comminucate with eachother and to then pass information on in a useful and (hopefully) efficient and earnest manner. This would be an example of a wheel-like network where the outer circle is made of every character on the island, all connected to their neighbors, and the spokes making up the wheel’s supports would be the cross-circle connections made as each character meets a non-neighbor. It would resemble something like a very complicated spider web once a few days passed.
Some of the survivors of the crash do not form any kind of team or network at all. One character, Shannon, simply stands in flaming chunks of metal and screams. Another couple of characters simply run to sidelines and sit in obvious shock. A few characters take individual initiatives. Hurley retrieves food on his own accord from the plane wreckage. Sun attends to Jin as he forages for and prepares edible sea faire. And Charlie takes it upon himself in a particularly intense situation to retrieve his (assuming) heroin stash in the plane’s cockpit toilet.
In brevity, the characters of lost in the first two pilot episodes form all manner of groups and networks. Some are spontaneous and involve no planning. Others are wide-ranging and require as much planning as a survival timeline will allow. And yet others are not teams or networks at all — just characters undertaking objectives and completing them individually. It was a diverse range, and it illustrated nearly all categories underlain by the book.
Apologies — my only source here are episodes 1 and 2 in season 1 of Lost as well as Chapter 8 in our book. To make up for this, I’ve tried to be as clear as possible concerning what character was doing what in each example.
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